Ehhh. This smart tattoo captures the power of your sweat to charge a biobattery that could one day run our devices. Disgusting, but useful. Source: Phys.org

COULD you imagine a world where we’d never have to plug in our gadgets to charge them?

Instead our sweat could power our devices and we’d never run out of vital battery again. Wait, what?

Scientists have developed what could be the grossest way juice up a battery by using a temporary tattoo that, when soaked by our own sweat, can harvest enough energy to power a biobattery. In theory, this battery could then be used to power mobile phones and smart devices — just make sure to give it a wipe first.

The team at the University of California San Diego found that when measuring lactate, which we excrete when we’re running or working out, electrons from the lactic acid produced a weak electrical charge. The scientists imprinted a flexible lactate sensor onto tattoo paper attached an biobattery and measured the electrical current on the upper arms of volunteers. Lo and behold, power was literally dripping from the volunteers.

Unfortunately, while the idea works the technology available to capture enough electricity to really power up gadgets is not yet available.

“The current produced is not that high, but we are working on enhancing it so that eventually we could power some small electronic devices,” according to Wenzhao Jia, Ph.D.

At the moment the researchers are able to squeeze 70microWatts of power per square centimetre of skin, but their electrodes are too small to capture all of this and are only generating about four microWatts — a simple watch would require at least 10 microWatts to run.

“Besides working to get higher power, we also need to leverage electronics to store the generated current and make it sufficient for these requirements.”

But breakthroughs in biobattery technology could prove beneficial as they recharge more quickly, use a renewable energy source (sweat) and are safer as they do not leak or explode. With the rise in wearable technology we hope for self-powered gadgets sometime soon, but if someone could think of a more pleasant method that’d be even better.